By Alex Brinkley
Who is watching the Olympics this year and why?
Not many NMSU students have been watching it, and the ones who have been are either avid sports fans, or have just been
keeping up with it through social media.
“I just saw the opening ceremony on TikTok,” said Nathaniel Gonzales, employee at Little Toad Creek.
But why does it seem like the majority of students aren’t watching the Olympics and why did most people not realize they were happening until after the opening ceremony?
“I just think Winter Olympics are hard because you have sports that nobody watches for the rest of the three years,” said Walter Rubel, General Manager of the radio station KTAL-LP.
While that has been a factor in the Olympics since the beginning, advertising for the Olympics seems unsuccessful spreading the word as one would expect, at least in Las Cruces.
With the world getting so much news through social media platforms these days, differing algorithms have played a huge
role in informing people about the Olympics and, for some, leaving them in the dark.
“I didn’t know about it at all. My personal algorithm isn’t very sports based,” said Mia Leilani Scandiffio, a sophomore at NMSU majoring in political science.
Interview after interview confirmed what Mia said.
“No I didn’t even know it was going on,” said Dom Martinez, employee at Dreamz, a local dispensary. “Everyone is so obsessed with the Epstein files that they don’t even know what else is going on. I feel like the algorithm is pushing it to the front of TikTok constantly and I have yet to see anything about the Olympics.”
If political news has been at the top of your feed, or if you may not necessarily care about the Olympics, that might explain why they are off your radar.
But others who have been watching the Olympics since they were kids, also learned they were not seeing Olympics news, apparently because their algorithms were targeting politics.
“I didn’t know until after the opening ceremony that it had already happened,” said Josh Sutton, owner of Compass Skate Shop. “I saw it on Reddit. It was the next day. The reason I knew it started was because it was a political article on J.D. Vance.”
For students who have been watching the Olympics, solo skating has been the most popular and has been all over social media, as the U.S. team has been making some great strides. The U.S. won gold in the team event, defeating Italy and Japan, and Ilia Malinin solidified it, winning in the solo men’s round. Malinin, in particular, is extremely popular around campus and all over social media, acquiring the name “The Quad God” for becoming the first person to complete a quadruple-Axel jump.
“Skating is my favorite because the Quad God is squatting,” said Jaylen Terrazas, a student at NMSU.
Others who have been keeping up with the Olympics have expressed interest in speed skating, snow boarding, and the luge.
“Ive been really into the luge,” said Isabella Tapia, student at NMSU. “It’s like nothing I have ever seen before.”
NBCUniversal announced that “through Wednesday, the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics is averaging 25.7 million viewers…marking the most watched winter games presentation at this point since 2014.”
Although this is the case, it seemst here is a demographic of people the Olympics are just not reaching, and algorithms seem to be playing the biggest role.
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